After graduating from AIMS in 2012, El Hadji won a three-and-a-half-year scholarship from DAAD, to conduct PhD research at the AIMS Senegal Research Centre. In May 2018, he was one of the first two PhD researchers to defend at AIMS Senegal, presenting a thesis titled: «l’Influence de la courbure sur certaines inégalités fonctionn elles». In June 2018, El Hadji won the Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh prize for mathematics, awarded by the Centre International de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées (CIMPA) and the Fondation de l’ Université d’Orléans, France. He recently completed a Post-doctoral fellowship at the AIMS Senegal Research Centre.